Nokia

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A $16.6 billion Nokia merger plan was announced today as the Finnish wireless-equipment specialist has begun an exchange offer for all the outstanding shares of rival Alcatel-Lucent SA (NYSE ADR: ALU).

With this public exchange offer, Nokia enters the final phase of its proposed $16.62 billion acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, first announced in April.

A $16.6 billion Nokia merger plan was announced today as the Finnish wireless-equipment specialist has begun an exchange offer for all the outstanding shares of rival Alcatel-Lucent SA (NYSE ADR: ALU).

With this public exchange offer, Nokia enters the final phase of its proposed $16.62 billion acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, first announced in April.

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) has radically retooled its flagship product, Windows 8, to fight for a bigger piece of a mobile computing market currently dominated by its rivals.

Microsoft unveiled a beta version of Windows 8 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week.

With a final release expected in the fall, Microsoft needs Windows 8 to be a winner.

Microsoft's Windows, which has owned desktop computing with a market share well over 90%, has not fared as well on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

Instead, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) have dominated the "post-PC era" with such products as the iPad and the Android operating system.

The Redmond, WA, tech giant now hopes that Windows 8, optimized for the touchscreens of mobile computing but sharing a unified look and feel between its tablet and desktop versions, will reverse its fortunes in mobile computing.

"Microsoft's future path is riding on Windows 8 and its success," Gartner Inc. (NYSE: IT) analyst David Cearley told the Associated Press. "This is a chance for Microsoft to re-establish itself in a market where it's becoming increasingly irrelevant."

Microsoft is at a critical juncture.

The Windows and Office franchises that the company was built on rely on continued growth in the PC market which has slowed in recent years.

This stagnation in the PC market has hurt Windows sales. Revenue from the Windows division was down 6% in the December quarter - the fourth time in the past five quarters that revenue from Windows has declined year-over-year.

Meanwhile, Apple has become the most valuable company in the world on the strength of its iPhone and iPad businesses.

Unless Windows 8 can establish a strong presence in mobile computing, Microsoft risks getting left on the sidelines of tech - still moderately successful, but with little chance for growth and waning influence.

Nokia Corp. (NYSE ADR: NOK) on Friday announced it was replacing its chief executive with Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Stephen Elop, in an effort to reverse its steep decline in the U.S. smartphone market.

The world's largest mobile phone maker said Chief Executive Officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo will step down and Elop, head of Microsoft's business software unit, will take the reins Sept. 21. The move represents a drastic shift for Nokia, which until Canadian Elop had never hired a non-Finnish executive for the top spot. But the company needs a strategy and management overhaul to compete in the profitable future of smartphones.

The move should appease Nokia's frustrated investors who have watched its market value slip 70% in the past three years as Apple Inc.'s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone, Research in Motion Ltd.'s (Nasdaq: RIMM) BlackBerry, and phones using Google Inc.'s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android platform stole the smartphone spotlight.

The struggle for dominance in the smartphone market is heating up and Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android operating system for handsets appears to be winning the war against Apple Inc.'s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone system.

When Apple debuted the iPhone 4 on June 24 it broke sales records. In the first three days, the company sold 1.7 million devices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Germany, the most for any version of its top-selling product.

But the popular device has been plagued by misfortune - including the suicide of a Chinese worker, lost prototypes, reception problems, and an inauspicious introduction to the press and public when Chief Executive Steve Jobs could not get the phone to connect to the Internet.

Apple Inc.'s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPad has lived up to the hype, garnering rave reviews and meeting sales expectations. That success is particularly impressive because previous attempts by other companies to launch similar products were met with abject failure.

Because they make up less than 1% of the personal-computer market, few observers realize that so-called tablets have been around for about twenty years now.

The first models offered detachable keyboards, pen-based applications, and were priced in the thousands. A few contributed to companies declaring bankruptcy shortly after their debuts. Most were as pricey as a laptop but without nearly as much memory or competitive features - "underpowered and overpriced" were the usual complaints.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) on Tuesday took aim at rival Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and its Android operating system by filing a patent-infringement complaint with the International Trade Commission (ITC) against smartphone manufacturer HTC Corp.

Taiwan-based HTC is the largest maker of phones that use Google's Android operating system, such as the Nexus One. Apple involved the ITC in hopes of banning U.S. imports of HTC devices made with the technology in question. However, that filing was paired with a suit filed in federal court in Delaware that claimed infringement on 20 patents.

Are you one of those holdouts who hasn't yet jumped into the high-tech world of smartphones? Well get ready, because the mobile-phone makers of the world are about to make you an offer that will be very difficult to refuse.

This may be the year when cheap prices finally drag millions of behind-the-curve consumers into the blossoming smartphone market, unleashing unprecedented strains on broadband networks as handset makers wage a price war in the midst of booming demand.

More than 1 billion mobile devices will access the Internet in the New Year, research firm International Data Corp. (NYSE: IDC) says. That's catching up to the 1.3 billion users that use a PC to go online, and the rate of growth for mobile users is 2.5 times the growth rate for PC use.

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